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Proper 10, 2017: Mad Farmer of the Cosmos

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Link to Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23, today’s text: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+13%3A1-9%2C+18-23&version=MSG

There are some problems with 1st century agrarian wisdom
as the core narrative of a 21st century urbanized info-culture.
But that is what we have so let’s make the best of it.

Jesus’ parable about God as a whacko,
impetuous farmer
is awesome and spot on.
God is not OCD –
there is nothing about God
that is obsessive-compulsive
because, as we see, life is scattered
throughout this tiny little planet of ours – and perhaps across the cosmos.

Life, and stupendous, marvelous,
spectacularly awesome miraculousness
is everywhere and willy-nilly.

Life, love, and abundance is scattered;
thrown to and fro,
not planted in neat little rows.

God, it turns out, farms
with a higher degree of randomness rather than order.
I find that simply awesome – and strange.

Think on it.

God is not even an Amish farmer
who we might expect to at least
carefully plant within the lines of Nature.
But unlike the Amish, who harvest a prodigious yield
with only the bare strength and ingenuity
of humans and domesticated animals,
God’s creation now brings forth the bloom of Life
from Petri dishes,
and abundance flows from synthetics drugs
and hybrid energy sources.
Up, and up, and up it comes
percolating from mechanical extensions
of the human mind,
and mathematical models
reaching far beyond our limited capacities.
I find it simply astounding – and disconcerting.

God is most definitely not a Monsanto farmer either,
as if scrupulously planting by cost-benefit ratio
and slavishly chasing the highest productivity
for the least investment of capital and labor.

We see this unorthodox God in Evolution,
itself a much more trial-and-error system –
if even a “system.”
Evolution leaves behind a wake of victims, wastefulness,
and failure.

In Evolution, we can see that God
is spectacularly wasteful,
spilling abundance even in the face of scarcity.
I think this is simply amazing – if not unbelievable.

If Jesus’ parable is apt,
then God is indeed a lousy farmer –
indiscriminately tossing seeds wherever they land.
And, in fact, we see evidence of this everywhere.

When hiking in higher elevations above the tree-line,
where it is often as barren as a moonscape
and even the most athletic human
finds him or herself huffing and puffing and sucking air,
it is not strange to stop suddenly,
arrested by astonishment
from a sight seemingly miraculous.

Perhaps you have seen it too.
I saw it again yesterday,
at Chimney Bluffs on Lake Ontario.
The wind,
or a bird,
will have deposited a seed.

No, not in fertile soil,
but on a lip of a rock,
a flat space no bigger than a child’s hand.

There on barren stone,
a spoonful of soil like a layer of crumbs
where a cake once sat,
blooms a tender, brilliant flower.

How could something so lovely,
so beautiful and seemingly fragile,
eek out life
from so very little?
And yet there it is.
Awesome.

But that is not all.
Those who trod the painfully bleak paths
of human extremes,
will witness the same thing.

Go, venture toward the ragged and harsh plains
where gather the lives of victims –
those crushed and scarred by violence or neglect.

A child once brutalized by abuse,
routine violence or extreme neglect –
even from someone who should have protected them –
and instead of barren scar tissue in that grown-up child,
there also blooms joy and hope
as sweet as any gentler life could issue.

How is it
that all sweetness and gentleness
is not snuffed out by indifference or cruelty?
Under pain and betrayal
that would crush many of us –
that does in fact, crush most of those in its wake,
still there can and does bloom love
and loving-kindness more powerful than suffering.
Miraculous.

But we need not look only to
the magnificence of Nature
or in the intimacies in other people’s lives.

Even in our own lives,
yours and mine,
the cuts and scarring of deep grief, ordinary abandonment or neglect,
rejection,
hurt,
sorrow and wounding;
even in all of these
the mad farmer of the cosmos
has planted seeds.
They grow there, in the bleakness.

Even there, even in us,
we have witnessed the bloom of joy,
the blossoms of hope,
the tiger lilies of love,
without our own intention or effort tending them.
They just grow.
Incredible.

Lewis Thomas, the famous biologist
and one-time director of Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Institute urged,
that now and again we should direct our attention
away from the 20% of smokers who get lung cancer,
and be astounded and amazed by the 80% who do not.

Life and love and abundance
are remarkably resilient,
and we find example after example
of their relentless bloom
wherever we witness the debris of violence,
cruelty, neglect and abuse
on the landscape of human activity
or on the inscape of the human heart.

God seems utterly indifferent
to the borders we create for our neat little gardens.

We make,
and live our lives,
along well planned little rows.

We expect to harvest what we plant
and that it will grow where we planted it.
But often, very often,
that is not what happens.

We discover that what grows
is not what we planted
but something else.
And we encounter the fruits of our labor
in places we did not plant it.

Often when this happens, we reject it –
because we did not plant it
or because we did not plant it there.

We get angry and resentful
that it is not as we did it.

“It’s NOT how we planned it, God,
and by-god, we are not
going to harvest something we did not plant!”

And so we miss the awesome,
the miraculous,
the amazing and inspiring
that is growing all around us – and within us.

I want to end where I began:
to go back to that dilemma
of ancient agrarian wisdom
as the core spiritual narrative
for 21st century urbanized, commercialized,
and consumerized Christians.

We have made a mess of Jesus’ parables.
We have taken these little beauties
blooming among thorns and along the barren paths,
and tried to domesticate them.
But they are vibrantly wild products
of the mad farmer of the cosmos
that won’t be domesticated.

A parable
is a figure of speech
that bears one self-evident truth.

They are not secret rhymes or coded messages,
nor mystical puzzles with sublime punch lines.

They are blunt instruments
creating insight through blunt force trauma to the mind.
Jesus used parables to tell bald face truths
with no apology,
no need for spiritual guru’s
nor hired guns in priestly robes.

Over time Christianity,
like all religions,
learned the value of holding secret truths
and passing them out one at a time
to those who had demonstrated loyalty.

But Jesus told truths outright,
self-evident truths about God
and about life inside the human heart and mind.

For example,
the punch line for today’s parable
is the simple, homely little truth
that God is a lousy farmer.

God splashes holiness and love indiscriminately,
without concern for where it lands.
In contrast,
we parsimoniously, timidly, and fearfully
plant our love only where we believe it will grow
and bear fruit to our liking.

That is the parable.

We could get creative
and make up our own parables about the same thing:
God is like a whale blowing sea water like a geyser across the ocean.
We are like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter.

God is like a sandstorm
burying everything in its path with generous abundance.
We are like a cautious whistle struggling to stay on tune.

God is like a flooding river
overwhelming its banks and changing the contours of the land forever.
We are like a church, offering communion and grace only to our members.

You see, there is no deep, dark, juicy secret here.
What we have is just a bald face truth.

We are being told
God is indiscriminant with the love that bears life,
so we should be little sloppier too.

That’s all.

It is not about being effective
it is about risking-taking with what matters.
It is not about being efficient
it is about radical hospitality.
It is not about cost-effectiveness
it is about reckless generosity.
It is not about conserving love
it is about scattering it.
It is not about getting it right
it is about practicing openness.
It is not about good order in all things,
it is about wild exuberance
in the midst of God’s amazing creation.

So…we are about to enjoy a lovely anthem;
a solo in which to pause and breathe in the moment.

I invite us to use it,
and allow the moment and
the mad farmer
to pry open our minds,
and shake loose our arms,
and limber up our fingers
and open wide our imaginations.
Where might you scatter your love?

On what little ledge might God have planted you –
someplace you may have had no idea about
until right now.

Where did you think there was not enough
nurture or abundance to grow or bloom?
Look again,
see if perhaps you’ve grown a little joy,
a sweet blossom of hope
you never imagined could have survived?

The mad farmer of the cosmos,
indiscriminant and radically generous
in astounding and stupefying ways,
makes our lives relentlessly open
to new scenarios
and new possibilities.
It’s crazy.

*Homage & thanks to Wendell Berry’s image of the Mad Farmer



 

 

Proper 9, 2017: Reversal Wisdom

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“Come to me,
all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

 

Burdens and yokes – each of us have them;
and some of us, like old lumbering oxen,
are no longer even aware of the weight we carry
soldiering on as we do through life.

You know, Jesus was downright smart.
I mean really,
Jesus must have had a sky high emotional IQ –
able to read and understand people in depth.

Not only were his stories and parables penetrating,
rascally,
and insightful,
he also had reversal sayings and parables
that came in the back door
and smacked the listener upside the head.

The Good Samaritan – an oxymoron.
A camel threading the eye of a needle – an absolute impossibility.
Those who love their life will lose it and those who lose their life will gain it – a paradox.
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – an absurdity.

He seemed to talk like that all the time,
or at least within the residue of what we have left to us.
I am sure he said plenty of ordinary things too,
like: “Please pass the spuds.”
Surely he put his foot in his mouth more than once, too.

But on the preaching circuit he was pretty phenomenal.
And so it is, with today’s gospel from Matthew.

Imagine what that proverbial image meant to a peasant?

Seriously, a yoke that is easy,
a burden that is light?
A first century Galilean peasant,
burdened by debt and taxes to absentee Roman landlords,
would never have experienced a light burden
or an easy yoke – an oxymoron.
Oxymoron,
reverse logic,
Zen Koan…
a wisdom-teacher is waiting in the bushes of such ancient reversal-sayings,
ready to jump out and rattle the cage of our logic and open us up to new insights –
or slam our mind shut.
That’s what happens.

We can hear such proverbs and exclaim, “No way!”
But that is the beauty of Jesus’ way of teaching: open up the mind
and something new will drop in;
or if we choose to close the gate,
he will leave us alone.
An easy yoke?
A light burden?

I want to share a difficult storyabout burdens and yokes
and reverse-wisdom.

Before I became a priest, as you may know by now,
I worked in an inpatient Mental Health Unit.
It was a marvelously therapeutic environment –
a Camelot with a miraculous healing milieu
balanced precariously upon the politics of healthcare and psychiatry.
It has long since fallen into the realm of institutional psychotropic drug therapy, I am sure.

But for a time a healer was at the helm, a Gestalt Therapist
with a mere Master’s degree in the land of the MD’s and Ph.D.’s.
She was a wizard of wellness.

Her name was Claire
and she would gather her staff each week,
those with large and small academic degrees
along with aids who may have only had a high school degree.

She gathered us to do our own inner work through dream interpretation
and the exploration of our own angels and demons.

One thing she would frequently do is invite us to name the patient on the unit that week
who was most difficult for us to feel empathy toward.

As it turned out, the patient we had the most personal difficulty with
was also often the one who evoked something in us
that was personally threatening.
In other words, and ironically,
the patient that was the most difficult to empathize with
was usually the one that evoked the deepest sense of personal vulnerable within us.

It was never that obvious of course,
and we had to work hard to figure out the source of our vulnerability because,
let’s be honest, who wants to feel vulnerable?

There was one thirty-something woman
that I just could not warm up to and often could hardly even care about.

The second time she was admitted she was on suicide watch
because she had tried to kill herself several times,
and judging by her efforts
she was growing quite serious about it.
We took away her belt,
her shoelaces,
her sheets,
her razor,
we even made sure she didn’t have
a plastic dinner knife.
Anything she might use to harm herself was kept from her,
or was keenly observed while she had it.

The woman was very quiet and introverted
and she bothered me a lot.
She bothered me because
I could never connect with her,
and I never had any sense
that I knew what she was thinking or feeling.

One day on my shift,
as I walked past her room,
I saw her hanging from the ceiling.

She had tied one sleeve of her nylon parka
to the sprinkler pipe on the ceiling
and the other sleeve around her neck.
She was still alive and adrenaline shot through me.
I yelled for help and ran into her room.

My first instinct was to grab the parka
and desperately try to tear it apart,
as if a string of yarn.
I don’t know how long it took me to come to my senses,
it may have been immediately or a minute
before I grabbed her by the legs and held her up as I called for scissors.

People came running,
the coat was cut, I lifted her down
and off she was taken to the emergency room.
She lived.

Instead of being elated or even thinking about having saved a life, I was angry.
My anger lingered and it confused me.

She made me so angry.
Everything about her aroused my anger and in that anger, I felt guilty,
ashamed and…well, angry.

In our group that week with Claire it became obvious why:
She made me feel powerless.
An otherwise large, strong and competent person,
she reduced me to impotence.
My immediate impulse to try to tear a nylon parka
revealed how much I depended upon my physical strength.
The fact I could never connect with her
diminished faith in my intuitive capacity.
My inability to get her to respond to me
and my growing anger about it, revealed how important it was to me
to have other people respond positively to my efforts.

All my normal abilities and the sense of power they provided me
were thwarted in her presence, and were intensified by the experience
around her attempted suicide.
The way Claire invited me into that exploration was like Jesus inviting peasants
to imagine an easy yoke and a light burden.

She asked me to intensify my anger.

Rather than trying to ignore it or moderate it
or numb it
or intellectualize it,
she encouraged me to intensify it: make it bigger, she encouraged.
When I made that anger bigger
I could suddenly see it.
It was powerlessness I feared
and that which drew me into my fear made me angry.

The invitation to intensify the anger
instead of keeping it at a distance
was an unexpected strategy that led to insight.
Likewise, that was Jesus’ strategy.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Put it on and feel it’s heaviness.
Put it on and feel how it captures and constricts you.
Feel it in your shoulders,
let your knees and hips feel its weight.
What are you carrying – intensify its weight if it helps.
In the encounter and relationship with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

Let me repeat that.

In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

But please, do not hear more than is being said.

This is not about courting pain and suffering,
as in some crazy, masochistic medieval spirituality.
It is not about those who are going through
intense sorrow and grief,
or the depths of despair and depression
making themselves feel worse.

This is about those of us who are cozy;
those of us who are within the normal walk we walk;
those of us doing just fine
with a few bumps here and there.
To those with a truly heavy burden
and a cruel yoke,
Jesus stretched out his arms
and invited them to use him
as a comfort station.

To those who lived in the mainstream,
supported by the current of economic comfort
and buoyed by social status
while leaving the multitude in their wake,
Jesus had in mind
an invitation to try on a yoke and burden.

But do not fear,
the invitation is not even for the biggest or heaviest of burdens,
nor the most restrictive or crushing of yokes.
You see, even the little ones
have something to show us.

Even the ordinary and everyday kind of burdens we feel,
or yokes we carry,
can deliver an insight to us:
that job that seems routine,
our home that feels like a money-pit;
relationships that are grinding or pinching,
those simmering conflicts or disagreements,
and the demands or neediness of others;
debt, grief, chronic physical pain, or emotional angst;
decisions we do not want to make;
losses we do not want to incur;
obligations we dread fulfilling;
inordinate needs or desires or fears that plague us…

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Whatever it is,
it is likely something you do not want to do,
and likely it evokes a range of emotions
you do not really want to feel.

But you see, when we do not want to feel it
we tend to do whatever we can to manage it
with the least amount of contact.
We distance it,
deny it,
detach from it,
suppress it.
That is our usual go-to response
when it comes to discomfort and pain.

But Claire’s wisdom,
and that of spiritual director’s
and other guides throughout generations,
is to enter into it
and intensify it
in the hopes of getting clear with it.

We are invited to venture into our burdens
and shoulder our yokes
and feel their weight,
so we can name what it is that weighs us down
and makes us leaden.
That is how we lighten our load,
and liberate ourselves from our yokes.

It is a Jesus paradox –
the kind of reversal wisdom
Jesus was famous for.

 

Trinity Sunday 2017: The Tao of Jesus

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TEXTS FOR PREACHING

Genesis 1:1-2:3, as told by Marc Gellman in “Does God have a Big Toe?”

“Partners”                                                                                          

 Before there was anything, there was God, a few angels, and a huge swirling glob of rocks and water with no place to go. The angels asked God,

“Why don’t you clean up this mess?” 

So God collected rocks from the huge swirling glob and put them together in clumps and said, “Some of these clumps of rocks will be planets, and some will be stars, and some of these rocks will be…just rocks.”

Then God collected water from the huge swirling glob and put it together in pools of water and said, “Some of these pools of water will be oceans, and some will become clouds, and some of this water will be…just water.”

Then the angels said, “Well God, it’s neater now, but is it finished?” And God answered…“NOPE!” 

On some of the rocks God placed growing things, and creeping things, and things that only God knows what they are, and when God had done all this, the angels asked God, “Is the world finished now?” And God answered: “NOPE!” 

God made a man and a woman from some of the water and dust and said to them, “I am tired now. Please finish up the world for me…really it’s almost done.” But the man and woman said, “We can’t finish the world alone! You have the plans and we are too little.” 

“You are big enough,” God answered them. “But I agree to this. If you keep trying to finish the world, I will be your partner.”

The man and the woman asked, “What’s a partner?” and God answered, “A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If you have a partner, it means that you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you. On the days you think I am not doing enough and on the days I think you are not doing enough, even on those days we are still partners and we must not stop trying to finish the world. That’s the deal.” And they all agreed to that deal. 

Then the angels asked God,

“Is the world finished yet?” and God answered, “I don’t know. Go ask my partners.” 

Matthew 28:16-20

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

SERMON

“What’s a partner?”
“A partner,” God answered, “is someone you work with
on a big thing that neither of you can do alone.
If you have a partner,
it means you can never give up,
because your partner is depending on you.”

Or, to put it in Gospel-language
instead of Marc Gellman’s Midrash:
“Go, therefore,
and bring all people to the water,
baptizing them
and teaching them
to live life as I would have.
And remember:
I am with you always,
your partner,
to the end of the age.”

Let’s try to hear these two voices,
God’s and Jesus’,
with the tonal quality and hushed ambiance
with which they are pregnant.

So retrieve, if you can, the echo
of an old sensation you have known,
when you felt so much love
that you could not even speak it.
Or a moment you felt so much joy
words not only failed you,
you knew that to speak any words
would diminish the feeling.

I hope there is a moment or two
within reach of your memory,
when you felt so full of God or life or love or joy
you just wanted to gush,
but could only stutter or flap your lips like a fish.
Now that kind of intensely infused ebullience
is not an every day occurrence,
but once in a while
we may get a full-to-the-brim amazement
for the graciousness of God
or the magnificence of life.

That is how I imagine Jesus felt
saying good-bye to his friends in Matthew.

Standing on the edge of knowing,
seeing but not quite touching
the God-of-all-creation,
he scrambled for last words.
They were not dying words,
but last words.
He had to say good-bye
when he knew it was not forever
even though it was final.
And it is no coincidence
that Jesus’ last words in Matthew,
the most Jewish of Gospels,
also mirror God’s first words –
at least the first words we put into his mouth in Genesis:
“And God looked around
at the stars
and the planets in their courses,
at the earth and oceans,
at microbes, insects, and even a bald ostrich trying to fly,
and God whispered in reverently hushed amazement:
“This is good.
This is really good.”

For God, who is apparently a god of few words,
such a short, terse proclamation
is downright ebullient.

As we might imagine it,
“This is really good,”
was so full of joy and love and laughter
that God, wanting to share the moment,
turned to the nearest animal
and impetuously shouted,
“Hey, be my partner in all of this, will you?”

And that was us.
And here we are, still working at it,
because when you’re a partner
you can never give up.

Now the only way we could ever imagine
that kind of moment with God,
in that particular way,
is because we have felt that way ourselves.

Maybe we have not felt that way
since Christmas Eve when we were five years old
and couldn’t sleep.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood with our arms around our greatest love,
gazing into his or her eyes
with the taste of their lips on ours.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since the painful veil of childbirth had burst
and there upon our skin laid the freshest flesh on earth
to whom we could only coo.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood silent at the edge of Letchworth canyon
or Seneca Lake at sunset,
or the mighty Niagara pouring itself through
the ancient narrowing funnel.
But sometime,
whenever it was,
we have known that sensation –
the wordless,
tearful,
unutterable ebullience
upon which creation was formed.

Truly, upon which creation was made.

Like a spoon balancing on the tip of a finger,
the creation balances upon God’s ebullience
and it courses through us,
filtered as it is
by the hard edge of pain we have known.
But nonetheless it there within us,
there to be called upon
like some ancient, deep oasis in the sand.

We need moments
and rituals and people
in our lives,
that remind us of our partnership
so that we don’t forget how to draw
upon that river of ebullience
deep down within our memory.

We can and do live long stretches of life
without that sensation of wordless joy,
and so we need special events,
and special people,
and special rituals,
to remind us it is there
and where to find it.

It being “Trinity Sunday”
there might be some expectation
that I would talk about the doctrine of the Trinity,
and proclaim or celebrate it.
But then again,
talking about the creator,
and the partner,
and their ebullience
may be all I have to say on the subject.

I think when we come to that imagination
about the beginning,
when God uttered in hushed amazement,
“This is really good”;
and when we try to hear
the reverential tone in Jesus’ voice
when he says good-bye;
that we need to remember something very basic.

Christianity is not a theology;
in fact, there a lots of theologies around.
Christianity is not a religion;
in fact, there are goo-gobs of religion around.
Christianity is not a moral system;
in fact, we have lots of moral systems.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life.
It is what that first generation of Jesus-followers
called “the way,”
and what we might call,
in our time of greater cultural fluidity,
The Tao of Jesus.

Our baptism,
if we will remember and contemplate
that baptismal covenant we often recite,
amounts to a partnership document.

“Will you travel the Tao of Jesus,”
we could just as well ask,
and our response is,
“We will with God’s help.”

And just as there are many ways of interpreting
and following the Tao of Buddha,
and the Tao of Mohammad,
and the Tao of Krishna,
there are many known ways to interpret
and to follow the Tao of Jesus.

And yet, every authentic Tao of Jesus
is fundamentally a partnership with God.
And every Tao of Jesus will take us,
if we are faithful and courageous with it,
to a moment or moments
of wordless ebullience.

No matter what it is
that brings us here to this place today –
whether we are seeking
or weary
or poor
or lonely
or simply following a routine –
what awaits us is the reminder of our partnership,
and an invitation to rejoin the path we lost
in the tangle that is our life,
and the hope that the partnership
and the path
will lead us to at least one more
incredible moment of ebullience.

That’s all I got, but really, it is a lot.

7 Easter A: Catching Fire!

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Texts for Preaching

Acts 1:6-14 

When they were together for the last time they asked, “Master, are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel now? Is this the time?”

He told them, “You don’t get to know the time. Timing is God’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when theHoly Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all overJudea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”

These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared – in white robes! They said, “You Galileans! – why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.”

So they left the mountain called Olives and returned to Jerusalem. It was a little over half a mile. They went to the upper room they had been using as a meeting place: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James.

They agreed they were in this for good, completely together in prayer, the women included. Also Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his brothers. 

Liturgical Reading
Excerpt from “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in affine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a splattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far a I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax – a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Good morning.

I want to begin with something
that may be obvious to some
and startling to others,
but needs to be said now and again.

On the Church calendar
this is not Memorial Day weekend.
Today, this year anyway,
it is the last Sunday of Easter season,
and on that Sunday we always hear a piece
of Jesus’ farewell in the Gospel of John.

The bigger point is,
in the Church, on Sunday,
we do not celebrate national holidays.

Whether it is Columbus Day
or Veterans Day,
Memorial Day
or Mother’s Day,

Independence Day
or Presidents Day,
on Sundays we do not mix
the celebration of Holy Eucharist
with any nationalistic holiday or cause.

That is because Christianity
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
has no nation.
Christianity has no national loyalty.
Christianity,
and our vows as baptized Christians,
does not recognize nationalism, internationalism,
partisanship, or any other secular ideology that exists.

In fact, every time in history a church or religion
has aligned itself with a national ideology
it created ugliness and spawned bitter violence.

Now all of us live with divided loyalties
and divided minds, and multiple commitments.
That is normal, expected, and understood.
But in this space, in this sanctuary,
there is no flag of nation
and no pledge of allegiance to party or constitution.

Therefore, while all of us
may well have loved ones on our minds
and in our prayers today,
and especially those who may have died
in the service of their country –
whether on a battlefield,
or in the line of duty,
or as a servant and advocate for justice –
we are celebrating Eucharist today.

So I hope no one is surprised
or disappointed
if they arrive on Mother’s Day
or Memorial Day
or 4th of July weekend,
and the theme of the Eucharist on such days
does not even mention the holiday.
Instead, our focus will always be
on the theme of that liturgical season,
or the sacred moment itself,
or on the open table we offer,
or the spiritual practice of our baptism.
It does not mean we do not care about
other cultural and civic events,
but simply that we let those be celebrated
elsewhere and on other grounds,
while on this holy ground
we gather for this sacred meal.

(Even that most special of all days
will not be observed here in a few weeks:
Father’s Day).

Now for the real sermon.

The editors of the Gospels had a problem.
It is one routinely faced in Hollywood and on television.
What were those Gospel editors supposed to do
for the last episode
after the amazing surprise ending
created by the resurrection?
How were they going to have Jesus exit
a second time?

It’s not unlike the dilemma faced
by television serials,
in which the season ends
with a main character getting killed.
What we often discover
at the beginning of the Fall Season
is that the character wasn’t actually killed as we thought,
and we are shown how he or she was saved.

Jesus is executed on the cross,
dies, and is buried.
The level of physical abuse
from the flogging alone was enough to kill him,
let alone the grueling physical torture on the cross.
His bloody body was laid in the tomb
and a big rock rolled over the doorway.
The tomb was sealed.

It was over.
It was finished.
But wait!
Unexpectedly, the stone is mysteriously dislodged
and the tomb is shown empty.

Jesus’ three-year ministry
is act one;
the betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution
act two;
the resurrection is act three.

But the author of the Book of Acts,
who is also the author of Luke’s gospel,
has a dilemma.
The Book of Acts
is the story of the earliest followers of Jesus,
and it has to figure out an exit for Jesus
before the next chapter can be written.
So the author of Luke-Acts creates an epilogue,
and has Jesus exit
the way other great prophets of Israel exited:
into the clouds.
Elijah did it
and so did Moses.

It is such a natural way
for a holy man or woman to exit
that Buddhism is full of ascending mystics too.
And in Islam, Jesus disappears like that as well.
In fact, the Quran tells us
Jesus did not really die on the cross.
It suggests that in fact,
he may have passed death altogether
when he was lifted up and taken directly to God.
That is because it is inconceivable in the Quran,
that a prophet chosen by God for such purpose
would ever be allowed to be tortured and executed
at the hands of enemies.
So of course he was taken up.

Figuring out a fitting exit for such godly humans
is a difficult challenge
because, let’s face it,
death is messy.
A torturous death is the messiest,
not to mention the most shocking and scandalous.

It strikes me that Jesus’ death is like that moth
in Annie Dillard’s pericope of illumination.
Jesus’ messy, torturous
and grotesque death
is a wick of holiness…for us.
His death continues to illuminates the darkness
long after,
as does a star that burned out
a hundred million years ago
yet flicker in the night sky tonight.

To appropriate Annie Dillard’s
exquisite description and apply it to Jesus:
The spectacular skeleton on the cross
acts as a wick.
Jesus keeps burning.
The holiness that fuels this fire
rises in the dead Messiah’s body
from his pierced and soaking abdomen
to his thorax
to the jagged holes in his hands,
and he widens into a flame –
a saffron-yellow flame
that opens a bud of light in our darkness
as if a bloom into the light of spring.

I love that image
because it reminds us of a hard
but spectacular truth
residing at the core of our spiritual wisdom.
It is a wisdom that may be so obvious,
so brilliantly radiant,
that we live in its light
but forget about its presence.

We are reminded of it
in our baptismal promises
every time we recite them,
and Jesus burning luminously upon the cross
reminds us of it as well.
In fact, anyone who has ever loved
has been reminded of it
with each painful sacrifice exacted by loving.

The wick of holiness
siphoning God into our hearts
like an artisan well draws water to Earth’s surface, is this:
a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

Think on that for a moment.
…a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

The first-responder that enters a burning building
to save the life of an utter stranger –
what is that?

The human rights advocate
who lives precariously on the margin
of deprivation and violence,
and who may even get murdered while trying to
non-violently defend those even more vulnerable –
what is that?

The health professional
that enters the quarantined zone to care for dying victims
or to help figure out what is killing them –
what is that?

Enlisting to serve in combat, knowingly going to war
to defend one’s country and preserve a way of life,
even for people never known. What is that?
Risking one’s life
in a particular moment
in order that a stranger may live,
is to illuminate the darkness
with an idea about life
that is greater than oneself.

To disappear
that someone else may have life,
is a powerful idea
greater than any single self.

It is an idea as well as an act
that defies the logic of survival
and self-preservation.

To willingly, perhaps even unnecessarily,
risk one’s life on behalf of others
or even on behalf of an idea, is stunning.
More than stunning.
it is confounding and astounding.

And yet, there it is
at the very heart of our spiritual wisdom.
Right there at the bull’s-eye
is an invitation to give it all up.

It is not a demand –
even God could not make such a demand.
It is an invitation.

It is an invitation to live life on behalf of others,
and it is the encouragement
to live life in such as way
as to create a more abundant life for all people.

At the heart of what we say and do
as Christians –
as people baptized into a particular
spiritual practice –
is the invitation to become a wick,
a conduit for holiness
between God and others.

It is an invitation to be willing
to give it all up if need be –
the ‘it’ being everything from life choices to life itself.

To get specific,
the baptismal covenant we have been saying
throughout Easter season,
is an insistent contradiction
of what most of us were raised to think and believe.
We were taught to be individuals and individualistic;
encouraged to be consumers in fact,
with insatiable appetites.
We were taught to care more about our own people,
and our own neighbors,
and our own nation,
and our economy
more than any other people or nations or economies
anywhere else, as if we are an island
that could survive without an ocean.

We have been taught to look out for #1
and that those with the most toys at the end win.
We have been nurtured to believe that success
and achievement is measured in dollars,
and power, and fame.

But in baptism,
yours and mine,
we are invited to reject those ideas as rotten
even at the cost of our own lives if necessary.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
in defeat of those rotten ideas.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
to supplant those rotten ideas
with new ideas that are not self-centered at the core.

We are invited to use up our own life,
if need be,
to illuminate the darkness
created by rotten ideas
as a moth burning brightly against the night.

Anyone who has even briefly strolled through Christianity
as it is articulated in the gospels,
knows this invitation.
If Jesus is about anything
it is about this invitation to use our lives
to illuminate the darkness.

And yet we take it for granted.
Jesus burning at the center,
wicking the love of God up his own mutilated body,
is so right there at the center of it all
we can easily forget,
and ignore, and deny it.
But when we juxtapose the baptismal invitation
to use our lives to illuminate the darkness,
up against our economic and cultural
measurements and standards for goodness,
it is startling –
crazy even.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
once challenged us, ironically as it turned out,
that the question is not
what are we willing to die for,
but what are we willing to live for?
Our baptism,
yours and mine,
challenges us with the same question:
“What are we willing to live for?”
What, in fact, are we living for?

In economics,
we would measure what we are living for
by what it costs us,
and its value would be determined
by the cost-benefit ratio.
That is not the baptismal standard,
and in fact,
that kind of economic standard
actually diminishes our lives.

What are we living for?
Once we know,
we can go out and spend our lives on it.
And it doesn’t matter how much life we have lived already, whether we are twenty or ninety,
the challenge is still the same.

In our baptism
we have been called to reject
rotten ideas about what our life is for
and instead, to use our life
on behalf of ideas bigger than us,
and for people beyond us.

It is a one-day at a time kind of thing,
and sometimes,
a one-moment-at-a-time kind of act.
Our spiritual practice,
described in our baptismal covenant,
invites us to become a wick of God’s love
that we may illuminate the darkness with our very own lives.

6 Epiphany 2017: We don’t have to be “good”

by

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Link to a Liturgical Poem for 6 Epiphany: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

Link to Lectionary texts for 6 Epiphany: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=18

The reading from Matthew this morning
begs for a foil,
someone or something
to stand in the middle of the road
and risk being run over
by the steamroller coming through.

Mary Oliver volunteered.

We do not have to be good.

Let me say it again,
even though I know it contradicts
everything we think we know from Scripture,
and especially from what we heard today:
We do not have to be good.

So let us dig a little deeper
than the categorical thinking we meet
on the surface of Matthew.
As hard as Matthew works to disguise it,
Jesus is actually quite compassionate and progressive
on divorce.

First of all, I want to just put it out there
in no uncertain terms:
the position of the Roman Catholic Church on divorce
is not rooted in Jesus.
Nor, by the way, was or is
the common understanding of divorce
in The Episcopal Church.

Again, let’s dig deeper.
Jesus’ teaching on divorce
is treated slightly differently
in the three gospels in which it appears:
Mark, Matthew and Luke.
So I am going to talk specifically
about what Jesus says according to Mark,
because Mark was the first Gospel
and both Matthew and Luke were poured from its mold.

As is true with anything we read or encounter
from ancient times – or more recent ones, for that matter –
to fully understand Jesus’ teaching on divorce
we have to know what is in the background.

So first of all,
Jesus is not merely being questioned
about his opinion on divorce;
the question has a very specific context.
The audience wants to know,
which of the great rabbis Jesus agrees with:
Rabbi Hillel or Rabbi Shammai?

In fact, a great many of the
parables and proverbial sayings of Jesus
are either from one of these two great rabbis
or a variation on what one or both of them taught.
Jesus did not just appear out of the clear blue sky,
like Superman from Krypton,
but was raised and influenced
by his time and place just as we are.

Jesus was born
and lived in the shadow
of these two great teachers and scholars,
Hillel and Shammai.
As if a grand theological “Point-Counter-Point,”
Hillel was what we might call the liberal
and Shammai the conservative –
although those modern categories
do not really work for the ancient text.

In the background of almost every question
a lawyer, Pharisee, or scribe poses to Jesus,
stand the hulking figures of Hillel and Shammai.
“Whose side are you on?” they ask Jesus.

Every bit as much
as they want to know Jesus’ opinion about divorce,
Jesus is actually being asked,
which authority he follows.
Not surprisingly, rather than taking sides,
Jesus does an unexpected dance
between the two great rabbis.

Here is the basic argument about divorce
that forms the context in which Jesus is asked the question. (And by the way, his answer on divorce,
is an example of how Jesus moves through polarities
rather than hanging out on any single pole).

Hillel and Shammai
argued about how the law on divorce,
in the Book of Deuteronomy,
should be interpreted.

Every argument at the time
hinged on that Deuteronomic law.

Deuteronomy grants permission for divorce
but only if a clear and specific regulation is followed.
Divorce was allowed for the man, not the woman.
But a man could not simply abandon his wife;
he had to follow a procedure called, “the bill of divorce”.
It was intended, in Deuteronomy,
as progressive for its time –
insuring more humane treatment of women and children
than the previous practice,
which was to simply abandon a wife
that was no longer wanted.

We need to remember that in Jesus’ day,
polygamy was still allowed,
and so this argument
was never about multiple marriages.
In fact, it is interesting to contemplate what adultery
might mean in a polygamous society,
rather than in one based upon the premise of monogamy.
But I’m not going to go there today.

So Hillel argued
that almost anything
could be a legitimate grounds for divorce –
bad cooking as much as infidelity.

Shammai said, no,
only infidelity is a legitimate ground for divorce.

It is in that context,
between those two positions, someone asks,
“Hey Jesus, what do you think?”

Jesus takes an abrupt and stunning turn
away from Deuteronomy,
and instead roots his argument
in another scripture altogether:
The Book of Genesis.

Jesus says, “remember how God created us male and female,
and how we were joined together (quoting from Genesis)?
Well, what God has joined together
no one can separate.”
Jesus is pointing to the human reality
of painful separation, loss, and abandonment
rather than to some fine point in the law.

From what I have been told
by those who have been through divorce,
it is in fact, more amputation than separation.

Even though the person we were enjoined with
is no longer present,
and even though a piece of paper
says we are no longer joined,
the phantom pain and memory
of a lost limb is still there.
After divorce,
so I have been told,
a piece of us is gone,
just as if a spouse had died.

For one thing,
most people get married with hopes and dreams
about the future.
The loss of hopes and dreams is a grief all of its own.

Even when the divorce is a long time in coming,
and there is no ambivalence
about it being the right and necessary thing to do,
the memories can be like
the phantom sense of a severed limb – still there,
and always a piece of us.
As therapists and counselors can attest,
no one who has been divorced,
or in any kind of profoundly intimate relationship,
ever goes into the next relationship
without bringing their former spouse or partners
right along with them.
That is just a fact of life for us,
just like we bring our mom and dad and sisters and brothers
into our relationships with us as well.

So Jesus does not make a case against the legality of divorce.
The legality of divorce
was never a question in Jesus’ day.

Nor for that matter, was the legality of polygamy.
Jesus does not say that divorce should be illegal,
which is what he would have said
if he were making that case.
Instead, he simply says,
that those who were once joined together by God
no one and nothing
can unjoin.
And we know, from our own experiences, that is very true.

So you see, the question about divorce
is not whether it is legal or not.
The question about divorce
has to do with the personal,
spiritual, and psychological truth
that people who have been joined
at that level of intimacy
are not separated
simply by a legal process or document.
It does everyone involved a disservice to pretend otherwise.

“Whose side are you on, Jesus, Hillel or Shammai?”
Jesus responds: “That’s the wrong question.”

What I imagine Jesus might say to us today,
is that the thing we should be talking about
is not the legality of divorce,
that is a given.
Rather, we should be talking about healing
when and after
a divorce takes place.

Let’s not jabberjaw with legalistic arguments, Jesus might say,
when there is real hurt and pain to deal with.

That’s what I imagine the meaning of his argument implied
to those standing around him.

In other words, Jesus might as well have said,
Let’s realize that when people have shared their
love,
dreams,
home,
their bodies,
and children,
no law will heal the amputation.
So stop with the silly either/or arguments already,
and let’s focus on how to nurture healing.

It seems to me that is what Jesus
was saying with his Genesis rebuttal
to the Deuteronomy argument.

But now, let’s go back to Mary Oliver
and where we began:
We do not have to be good.

In fact, we do not always recognize
what is good
over what is bad, or even evil.
There are many times in our lives,
both personally and historically,
that we do not have enough information
in the moment of decision,
to know whether we are making
a “good” or “bad” decision.
Does that make us “bad” if we choose poorly –
I don’t think so.

The truth is,
if our eyes are open
and our minds receptive,
we understand that qualifiers
such as good and bad,
moral and immoral,
true and false…
are almost always gradations or continuums,
rather than stationary positions
that never move
and are always the same.

My life has not been very long compared so some of you,
but I cannot remember a time since the 1960’s
when we had such a wide-spread,
social mental illness
as we do right now.

It is not just ‘out there’ in the world either,
but right here in this congregation –
around us,
and among us,
and within us.

I am of course referring to the categorization,
the bitter bifurcation, and alienation,
between Trump and Not-Trump;
between left, right, and center;
between black lives matter and all lives matter;
and every other categorical separation
we have, and are creating.

This polarization makes the world,
and our every action and thought a categorical polemic
between black and white,
right and wrong,
straight and crooked,
good and bad.
There is no in-between,
no gradation,
no gray,
no ambiguity,
no situational particularity.

It is a common adolescent worldview
in the literature of human development theory.
Except, when we are fully grown adults
and adolescent thinking is still raging in our minds,
it becomes more of a mental illness.

When adults try to live in a thoroughly polarized world,
it creates the same whirlwind,
rollercoaster ride of emotion
that is characteristic of a teenager.

I would go so far as to suggest
such categorical, polarized thinking
contributes to all manner of social ill
from substance abuse to infidelity,
and from segregation to violence.

In our more sane moments,
we recognize our world
as far more nuanced
than the one characterized by the current
political, theatrical, and news media Rorschach.

We know we live on a continuum between the poles,
and rarely, if ever,
do we actually stand on one
or the other extreme.

Our real world,
THE real world,
calls for much more consultation with others
than pole-sitting at the extremes allow us.

True community,
true spiritual community,
includes sharing our hearts and minds
with one another,
and with sages and professionals,
both ancient and contemporary,
who offer guidance for better ways of living.

We do not have to be good
because we cannot be good
in any absolute sense.
Being “good” in absolute terms
is not one of our choices.

We get to be
good AND bad,
lucky AND sad,
right AND wrong,
up AND down,
in AND out,
and bounced on bumps all along those continuums
like a stagecoach on a dirt road.

That is where we live…all the time.

And in order to live there
with a modicum of happiness and joy,
we have to be able to
“…let the soft animal of our body love what it loves.”
We …do not have to walk on our knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Instead, we have to listen
for …the world (to) offer itself to our imagination,
call(ing) to (us) like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing our place
in the family of things.

What I hope we hear in all of this
is that we are not supposed to live in a straightjacket
between absolute right and absolute wrong,
but within the world
and the life
that is ours to live.
It is a world in which the wild geese
call our name
and announce our place
in the midst of a living world,
rather than a brutally idealized world
of false categories.

Sometimes, and this is one of those times,
the task of the preacher
is not to proclaim the Scripture
but to hammer it to see what’s in there.
The poles are fire and ice
and we need to move away from them, not toward them.

We do not have to be good,
because that is not one of our choices.

Now when you go home and someone asks,
“What did that guy preach about this time?”
Please don’t say, “Oh, he said we don’t have to be good.”
Instead, though it’s a little more complicated,
say that he said, we need to live as faithfully as we know how
in whichever moment we are in,
with the choices we are given –
AND, like Jesus,
by creating more choices if possible,
than the ones others have given us.

Our Vision

Our vision…a Trinity Church known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of our community, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

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“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

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